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Constituency

Dates

Family and Education

b. 1533/34, 4th s. of Sir William Tyrwhitt of Scotter by Isabel, da. of William Girlington of Normanby; bro. of Sir Robert II and Tristram†. m. c.1560, Ellen, da. of Lionel Reresby of Thrybergh, Yorks., 5s. 6da.1

Offices Held

Biography

Marmaduke Tyrwhitt probably owed his election for Grimsby to the influence of his family, as Ambrose Sutton, who married his sister, may also have done in the spring of 1554. It was certainly Tyrwhitt’s elder brother Sir Robert who extinguished his hope of re-election there in January 1559; when Sir Robert Tyrwhitt asked the borough to give a nomination to the 9th Lord Clinton he added, ‘and for my brother Marmaduke, I have stayed him that he shall make no further suit to you for the same’.3

Tyrwhitt’s appointment in 1571 as an ecclesiastical commissioner in two dioceses implies that he received some legal training, as does his receipt two-and-a-half years earlier of a writ empowering him and a common pleas judge to accept the surrender of the clerkship of Lincoln castle. His relationship by marriage with Christopher Wray, whose dispute of 1586-7 with Richard Topcliffe over the tithes of Corringham he was one of those commissioned to settle, is also suggestive of a legal connexion, as is perhaps his presiding over his own manorial court at Bottesford, Lincolnshire, in October 1591. It is, however, in civil dress that he is depicted, with his wife, five sons and six daughters, on his memorial brass at Scotter, which states that he died on 21 Jan. 1600 aged 66 and that he had been married for almost 40 years.4